Firefox ... we use it all day, for everything from managing
finances to socializing to playing games. But it's a
large and complicated programs. Are you getting the most out of
your browser? In this series, I'll offer some tricks you can
use to spend less time getting more out of the web.

I'll concentrate mostly on Firefox since that's the most popular
Linux browser. But most Firefox tricks will work in other
Mozilla-based browsers, and some will even work in
non-Mozilla browsers like Konqueror and Opera.

I'll start the series with my favorite trick that not
many people seem to know about: Bookmarklets.
If you're a regular user of Firefox, I'm sure you're
familiar with bookmarks, and you probably have a long list of them.
But you might not have seen their most useful form.

What are bookmarklets? Think of them as active bookmarks: bookmarks
that can do something more than just take you to a single static URL.
Sometimes bookmarklets are bits of Javascript code. But the simplest
ones are just regular bookmarks with the addition of a parameter.

For instance, the default search in Firefox uses Google. That means
anything you type in the regular URLbar that isn't a URL will result
in a Google search -- no need to waste space on a separate Google bar.

Google's great, but what if you want to search with Yahoo and see how
it compares? Of course, you can go to yahoo.com and type some search
terms; but what if you do that all the time? A Yahoo search
bookmarklet is just the ticket.

First you need a URL for your bookmarklet.
Go to Yahoo, type in a search term like banana and see where it
goes. Yahoo will take you to a URL like this:

Go ahead and save that as a bookmark, using
Firefox' regular Bookmarks->Bookmark this page menu item.
Trim it down if you want to --
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=banana works just as
well as the longer version.